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In my family, we've never recognized a distinction between happiness and the handling of books. Books in libraries, books in shops. Books that take you places, and books you can steal from — like Norman Maclean's memoir, "A River Runs Through It," whose opening sentence (about religion and fly-fishing) has been ransacked for the benefit of that first paragraph. My father, a journalist and professor, haunted bookstores, collected first editions and briefly ran his own tiny bookshop. For his 80th birthday, we made an after-hours appointment with one of his favorite booksellers — John Cole's Book Shop in La Jolla — and cut loose on a family...

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In my family, we've never recognized a distinction between happiness and the handling of books. Books in libraries, books in shops. Books that take you places, and books you can steal from — like Norman Maclean's memoir, "A River Runs Through...